I’ve been hearing for quite a while how HTML5 and CSS3 are going to ignite the web (as if it needed any help). Most of this talk started with the release of the iPad and Apple’s anti-Flash stance.
Here’s the problem. Most of the browsers out there do not understand HTML5 yet. It’s the same thing web designers have had to think about when designing for Internet Explorer.
IE6 never did web standards very well so you had to add *hacks* to work around it. Only recently have I begun to ignore IE6 in my designs even though it was first released in 2001. I’ll probably still even have a peak just to be sure my page doesn’t look horrible in it.
Even the newest IE still doesn’t get CSS rounded corners or text shadows. Basic design elements. So you’re left with a dilemma of whether to design something new and cool for your visitors, but worry about how many people won’t be able to see it or is it better to fall back on older more browser friendly techniques.
My deciding factor is usually how well a technique fails. If rounded corners or text shadows fail, you just don’t see them, not too bad. HTML5 might just fail completely. I do see it being eased in as more browsers are comfortable with it, but it’s nowhere near an end all right now and isn’t due to fully kick in until the year 2022 or later.
Right now a few browsers do support HTML5 including Google Chrome and if you would like to see some cool previews Mashable has some
I have a category with some of my favorite site designs on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Paul’s Market. I just surfed into this site and love the look of the main page. Their great pictures stopped me and made me take notice. It was a simple, but elegant way to display them as a menu. Something that looked new and different.
The rest of the pages are nice and carry on the theme very well.
My main complaint is that I don’t like light text on a dark background and I really don’t like darker text on a dark background. Avoid things that makes it harder for human visitors.
Saw an ad on Craigslist the other day that made me smile. It always amazes me what people think others will fall for.
Startup lifestyle magazine needs a creative web designer/programmer interested in starting with a company from the ground up.
You would help develop the online magazine website and be responsible for monetizing and driving traffic to the websites.
Perfect for someone looking to build a portfolio, this is a volunteer/intern position with the possibility of a small stipend and commission.
FYI
If someone can do that, why do they need you?
I Like Black Text On A White Background. Maybe it’s because I’m old and can’t see as well as I used to or maybe not.
The thinking of many webpage designers is the look of the entire page.
I’ll agree when looking at a screenshot of a page my eye goes to the entire page.
Having different colors for the font and background of a page look really great, but are sometimes hard to use.
Looking nice is one thing, but what most (human) visitors expect is something that’s easy to use.
If the colors of your content make it hard to read, maybe you shouldn’t do it.
More about this.
I saw a great post by Eric Brown on the Search Engine Guide site where he reports on an apartment rental company in Michigan who’s blog has nothing to do with apartment rentals and are still top of the search engines.
They offer virtual sightseeing tours, restaurant tips and reviews, and other good information about the community. Without ever directly plugging their main business from their blog their website business has more than doubled. A very good lesson for anyone interested in writing or improving a business blog.
If your blog screams that you can “Make You A Million Dollars”, but offers no other value for free, your visitors will not take you seriously. However, if you offer them something of value without any strings attached they will take the time to find out what else you can offer them, even if it’s not free. In fact, they will look expecting to have to pay for it. You’ve already proven that your experience can be valuable to them.
As a designer I think that the Urbane Life Blog is very hard to read, with blue text on a black background, but they have done everything else right. It’s just my opinion and who knows the blue on black may even help them.
When first starting or adding to a website one of the first things that you want to do is to decide on which keywords to target. These words should be action words to get your visitors to do whatever it is that you want them to do when they land on one of your pages.
Usually a new client will ask me which keywords should I pick and how do I use them? I usually first explain that keywords can be and usually are more than one word. How it can be very hard to get to the top of a search results page for a one or two word keyword that is very competitive (like “web design”). It can be much easier to get to the top spot for a more narrow keyword (“web design Pittsburgh”, “web designer western PA” or “WordPress expert Pittsburgh”), but because the action inferred from that keyword is more specific to what you do, the traffic from a search term like that may also convert to sales better if you pick the right one.
Another great advantage in more targeted keywords is if you are buying keyword ads you can save quite a bit of money not getting clicks that aren’t really interested in what you have to offer.
It’s always best to have one unique page per keyword and to use your keyword once in the main headline, maybe once more in the sub-headline and a couple of times in the body text. It’s a good idea to read the page out loud before it’s published to see if it sounds spammy. If you have overused your keyword it may be considered spam by the search engines or worse by your human visitors.
To help my clients pick good keywords I have been sending them to a older post where I suggested some free keyword research tools (two of the three still work). I’m writing this post today because I found a new free keyword tool from WordStream and I thinks it works really well so I’m now recommending it to everyone.
I have written before about looking at your statistics to see if you can change your content to improve sales.
It’s something that any site owner should think about before designing or redesigning your site. I saw a post today on Seth Godin’s blog that offers a great list of things to consider.
I have a category with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called The Color Cure.
They are a small creative team based in the Philippines. They have a great site. Clear, easy to read and I just love their menu. A cool simple idea that I haven’t really seen before.
I’m not sure why, but I have seen many ads on Craigslist lately asking for free website help from non-profits in exchange for a tax deduction. I sometimes write them back and explain that labor directly donated to a non-profit organization is not tax deductible. Many expenses like buying software to accomplish the task would be, but not labor.
I believe (I’m not an expert, check with your tax advisor) that someone could pay me to create a site for a legitimate non-profit and they could deduct their payment to me and I would have to declare the income, but I know for sure that I cannot donate my time directly to the non-profit and write it off.
I have had some pretty good exchanges with folks who refuse to believe this, even after I send them to the page on the IRS’s website that explains it in plain language. So, if you are a new designer or someone else who sells your services beware of anyone who tells you your time IS deductible and that you can write off your time as a donation to them.
I am currently working with a customer who wants to set up a store. They had a spreadsheet of the items that they want to sell. There are over 3,000 of them. Creating a database if items for a shopping cart is not that unusual, but in this case the item images were in the spreadsheet as a URL on the vendors website.
I didn’t want to hot link the images because there can be all sort of problems with that, so I needed to download and shrink most of them to a usable size. So for 3,100 images and thumbnails for each I was looking at over 6,200 images. No small task.
I did quite a bit of research and tried out several of each kind and I discovered two programs that I want to recommend here today.
First Free Download Manager, as the name says is free (and open source another plus) and designed to do much more than what I needed it to do. Free Download Manager allows you to: adjust traffic usage; to organize and schedule downloads; download video from video sites; download whole web sites with HTML Spider; operate the program remotely, via the internet, and more! It allowed me do save over 6,200 images in under two hours.
Next I needed to resize these images to fit in the cart so they wouldn’t crowd out the description or force things off the page. BIMP Lite came to my rescue. BIMP Lite is a small and simple batch processor for image files, that allows you to perform various functions on multiple images. BIMP is not open source, but it’s 100% FREE and contains no spyware, adware or nagware. It also does much more than resize, you can add many other image and file name operations.
A couple of great programs that I highly recommend.
